We’re back! Buffeted by gales and paddling in the tide of emails, but in good poetry heart for 2012. Delighted to hear that The Bees by Carol Ann Duffy has won the Costa poetry award – it has been selling well from the SPL shop (£12) – and also that Matthew Hollis’s account of the last five years of Edward Thomas’s life, Now All Roads Lead to France, has won the Costa biography award. Congratulations to Jo Shapcott on receiving the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. We saw Edwin Morgan’s, awarded in 2000, and it is a thing of beauty.